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Monday, October 14, 2013

I’ve been reading/skimming a lot of novels lately. Frankly I’ve
always been an obsessive reader (as in, who needs sleep, food, showers, or fresh
air when you have books?).* But lately I’ve been doing a lot more analyzing—something
I rarely did in the past. (Which lack is not an impressive quality in an
author-to-be. Which is not even remotely the point of this blog post.)

The point is that I’ve started noticing some things about a
large number of these books—many of which have been self-published. Let me
first say that I think self-publishing is wonderful in so many ways. This is by
no means a disparagement of self-publishing. However, I have noticed that many
of these particular books that I’ve been reading bear a few unfortunate commonalities.

The biggest of these is problems with story elements that simply
don’t make sense, that never get explained clearly—things that are obviously a
big deal to the characters but that I just don’t understand. For example, I
recently read a novel in which the main character is cursed (in rhyming couplet
and all). But the curse is so confusing that I never actually understood the
peril, even after the character theoretically figured it out. In another novel,
I couldn’t understand what the main character thought he was saving the world
from.

Here’s what I think happened: It all made sense in the
author’s head. It was perfectly clear. But somewhere between the brain and the
keyboard, some of it just got lost, or muddled, or twisted around until it no
longer made sense for a reader.

Now, I am a copyeditor. If you haven’t heard me mention that
yet, here you go: I copyedit. I pick up the tiny details that no sane people
care about (like smart quotes vs. straight quotes—oh how it burns me). This is
useful stuff for an author. It means my manuscripts (once I have actually
worked on them sufficiently) are quite clean overall. Of course I miss things;
I’m human. But grammatically and punctuationally,** my work tends to be in good
shape.***

So, onto my point.

Being a copyeditor isn’t good enough to make a good
manuscript. It requires someone else to look at your book—someone else who hasn’t
been swimming through it for the past many moons, someone who knows only what
is there on the page. This is something every writer needs. This is why agents
and editors exist (well, among other stuff). This is what self-published
authors must get as well.

Last week I heard about this giveaway at Portable Magic
Editing. What a great way to get started. Sign up, ye authors! Sign up! (Or
maybe don’t, because that decreases my chances of winning.)

We authors need someone to tell us when we’re writing
nonsense. Someone other than our angry readers.

* I both love and fear
that I gave this obsession to my older daughter. Oh the pride that shines in my
eyes when I see her walking in from the car, to the dinner table, and off to
her bedroom carrying a book and reading as she walks. I remember those days so
well (probably because they were just yesterday). Sadly, she has not yet
developed the talent of looking where she’s going at the same time.

** Do you love how I’ve
just told you I’m great with words and now I proceed to make them up?

*** Now I’m going to
be severely embarrassed when it turns out I made some particularly dumb mistake
in this post. Oh well.

Thursday, October 3, 2013

I was only maybe two or three chapters into this book when I
realized that there was something magical about the book itself, not just the
story within it. It took me a while to figure out what made the book so
dreamlike and lovely. So far it certainly wasn’t the storyline—in the first
several chapters we are treated primarily to an abusive/bordering-on-murderous
father, a suicide, an incredibly out-of-place vulgarity,* and another father
figure who adopts an orphan only to prepare him to fight to the death. So, not
a lot of loveliness there.

But there are two hints that pull you through the ugliness
of the opening story. The first is the opener, a truly brilliant page that uses
the second person POV (“you do this, you do that”). It is an invitation to
enter the Cirque des Rêves (the Circus of Dreams) and come see for yourself,
and it works like a magnet, pulling you in.

The other hint was something I had a hard time quantifying
at first. There was something in the quality of the writing that made it
beautiful, but it’s not as if there were many particularly beautiful sentences
or paragraphs that I could point to. Eventually I decided that it felt like the
cadence of the writing, the rhythm of the words, a little like a gentle lullaby
or the soft rocking of a boat on calm water. It was like that quiet space of
time before you fall asleep and dream, where your mind is suggestible and everything
seems possible.

To me, that dreamy cadence is what made this whole novel
work so well—beyond the fantastical world of the circus and the romance of the
story, either of which would have made the book a success on its own. But it
was that strange and lovely rhythm that made the book magic.

I would totally go to this circus.**

A side note: My book club met to discuss it, and we dressed
in black and white with a splash of red, just like the fans of the circus. We
ate black and white and red themed foods (which was really hard, by the way—there
aren’t a lot of nondessert items that are really black or white). I lit cinnamon-
and vanilla-scented candles and darkened lights, and I wished I could have
hired a contortionist (okay, not really). It’s a good book club book, and it
lends itself very much toward sensory experiences.

A content note: I’ve already revealed pretty much all the
negative content. There is a little more violence, as well, but it is not
graphic and does not glorify the violence. The only other content concern is a
short, nongraphic sex scene. You can see it coming a mile away and easily skip
the page.

* I recognize that in
the writing world, I’m a bit of a prude. But even setting that aside, this
particular swear word was so out of place in the story. It felt like a definite
misstep for pure (and pointless) shock value. It was so jarring, so wrong for
the diction, the setting, and even the character that I had to look it up to
see when the word first came into use. It did, indeed, originate before the
setting of this story, so at least it wasn’t anachronistic, but it still didn’t
fit. There are so few critiques that I have to offer for this story, but I
really think this one was a mistake.